"There are unsmiling faces in fetters and chains on a wheel in perpetual motion.
Who belong to all races and answer all names with no show of an outward emotion.
And they think it will make their lives easier, but the doorway before them is barred.
And the game never ends when your whole world depends on the turn of a friendly card." Alan Parsons

6/18/17

Nuance

This is Japan in the 1930s.

This was a culture in conflict with itself.

This is the US now.

This is a culture in conflict with itself.

Shall we look at the flip-side?

Japan:

US:

Both of these countries love their military and at the same time they love their leisure.

One country helped foster a world war, the other wages war all over the world.

I am going to quote a paragraph from a book (Total War, Calvocoressi & Wint) written in 1972. I am going to substitute the word Japan with US.

The prime evil of the US was certainly the ascendancy of the military. This led, in time of war, to the Supreme Command (the president and his NSC) conducting the war as a state secret from the civilian parts of the US administration. Whatever else may be said of such a system, it proved to be most incompetent militarily. Thus US militarism held within it the seeds of its own defeat. It was unable to organize US society so that in modern warfare it could compete with the powers which were organized to be more flexible.